stamp 202512061056
Harari said in his book Sapiens that the timeline we live in only seems realistic and even inevitable because it’s the only reality we know.
But if we consider alternative histories and look at our own timeline from that perspective, some turns seem really absurd. Like what was the chance that a niche Jewish messianic sect would develop into a world dominating religion? Roughly the same, he says, as the Hare Krishna Movement being the official US religion in a couple hundred years.
Related
- This reminds me of how editorial choices bury reality tv plot lines. 5b1b2-the-lost-plotlines-of-reality-tv-remind-me-of-the-lost-arcs-of-history
- In John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War, faster than light travel is really a “magic trick”, where they don’t really travel faster than light but fork reality and create an alternate timeline to place the traveling ship in. Forked timelines are so similar that in practice, people don’t even notice the difference. But in actuality, if two people traveled on different ships and meet again, they are “foreign” to each other, coming from different parallel universes.